With the development of the Internet in recent years, a usage pattern of connecting to a plurality of application servers located in a data center, a company network or the like from a client in a remote place to use applications in the application servers continues to increase. With an increase of such a usage pattern, a load on an application server executing applications has increased year by year. To cope with this, a general available method is to arrange a plurality of application servers for load distribution while improving the scalability thereof. In order to improve the scalability of application servers, there arises a need to perform load distribution of the communications between the client and the applications among a plurality of application servers by using an intermediate communication apparatus.
Meanwhile, a data relay apparatus is known, which collects load information on a server as well as on a path from the data relay apparatus to the server and selects a path between a client and the server on the basis of this load information (e.g., see PTL 1).